we start with dan gross. his latest piece is titled "obama brinksmanship puts gop in tough spot on debt ceiling." so dan, you write that while you fall off a cliff, you only bump your head in to a ceiling but economically the ceiling has the capacity to deliver far more damage. you are talking like my friend steve kornacki here. what is failing to raise the debt ceiling? why is that going to be catastrophic? >> well, you know, first of all the stock and bond markets will really go haywire in a way they didn't when we were about to go over the fiscal cliff because government bonds are held by everybody. chinese central bank, japanese central bank, every single bank financial institution out there. so if there's any question over the value of those and they start to decline, these institutions have a great amount of leverage and interconnected with everything else and sort of see what happened in 2008. it's also this issue of, you know, who gets paid? if you start to have to say maybe soldiers get paid but not